Phorm's peculiar new burst of PR - the launch, particularly, of its "Stop Phoul Play" website - may look odd for a company which requires consent, rather than antagonism, from potential users. But digging into it reveals a number of rather intriguing facts. To wit:

1) a website called Uninphormed.com seems to have been set up - anonymously (the whois details are obscured) - in April of last year to try to "counteract" publicity that wasn't favourable to Phorm. But it also seems to have quickly run out of steam; the last post there (about Richard Clayton) was in July 08. Total posts: five.

Whose idea was uninphormed.com? Why did they start (principally sniping at Clayton and Chris Williams, the reporter on The Register who has made a lot of the running on Phorm stories)?

2) We're told that the Stopphoulplay.com site has eased up its language relating to the BBC's story of Tuesday about the swapping of emails between the Home Office and Phorm over whether its service was legal, and what the Home Office position would be. (The Home Office has denied any suggestion of "collusion".) If it's confident of its case, why would it do that?

3) Where exactly is the Stopphoulplay.com website hosted? This could matter if any of those named take it upon themselves to call up a libel lawyer to see whether any of the material there - phrases applied to a named group of people on the site, such as "distort the truth", "smears" and "privacy pirates", all made the lawyers at the Guardian wince.

Now, it ill behoves journalists to advise anyone to call up libel lawyers, because that can potentially chill free speech, so generally we dislike it. But like it or not, libel law is a facet of life in the UK. In the US, it's rather different: the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, meaning you can say nearly anything; libel cases are extremely rare there.

Phorm insists that the server is located in the US.

But is it? An IP query shows it at the IPv4 address 91.205.220.31 - part of a block that belongs to Phorm itself. That block is assigned to RIPE - the European IP blocks.

So on first glance it seems like the server is actually in the UK, and so might fall under UK (libel) jurisdiction. But wait - you can set up a server in the US and simply get your DNS (domain name server) to point to it, serving the content from abroad. (Strangely, traceroute fails on trying to make the hops to the server. If anyone can explain that, we'll all be wiser.)

Some things don't point to a US server, though. Two points: first, the time required to contact the stopphoulplay server. (Pinging stopphoulplay.com fails, at least for me.) It's short for contacting a US-based server; viewed on an HTTP client that shows the raw redirects, there doesn't seem to be any messing around with extra hops.

But we've also heard from a source in the industry that

I have verbal confirmation that Phorm have "webservers" in the address listed at Telestra Europe colo.

So the second mystery: why can't we figure out where the server is physically located? And where is it?